Run results for: Clone node vs create element

Run details:

User agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/125.0.0.0 Safari/537.36

Browser: Chrome 125

Operating system: Linux

Device Platform: Desktop

Date tested: 2 years ago

Clone node

2K/s

Create element

1K/s

View exact numbers

Test name	Executions per second
✓ Clone node	1,654 Ops/sec
Create element	1,013 Ops/sec

Script Preparation code:

function createExample() {
  var el = document.createElement('div');
  el.className = 'class-1 class-2 class-3';
  el.id = 'example';
  el.textContent = 'Test';
  return el;
}

Tests:

Clone node
var clone = createExample(); var i = 1000; while (i--) { clone = clone.cloneNode(true); }
Create element
var el = createExample(); var i = 1000; while (i--) { el = createExample(); }

Run results for: Clone node vs create element

Compare cloning element vs creating a new one

Clone node

Create element